


you could say something poetic about the past clinging like a cape or you could just admit nightmares blow and trauma isn't fair

by rarmaster



Series: don't you worry child [19]
Category: Homestuck, Tales of Symphonia, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)
Genre: DAVE AND MALOS AND THEIR WEIRD BONDING IS REALLY GOOD T B H, Gen, and that's the self indulgent soup i made i hope you enjoy it, anyway everyone deals with dave dealing with his feelings re bro, bro is a topic on the table but he's not Here, dave and malos have a feelings jam of a sort, everyone hates bro, implied davekat - Freeform, implied mithos/chara..... mithos just has a bad crush though, kratos and anna like aw hell we adopted another child, like no seriously if he were here he'd get his ass kicked five times over, mithos is disaster gay for chara and he hates it, no i DON'T know how this ended up being nearly 12k
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-23 01:53:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23003860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarmaster/pseuds/rarmaster
Summary: Given the fact that no one is telling him fucking anything, Dave thinks coming to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, Bro has been resurrected through multiverse time travel bullshit isn't totally unfair. But then trauma isn't fair so like. Whatever.Or: Dave has a nightmare, and maybe overreactsjusta little.(DYWC)
Relationships: Dave & Kratos, Dave & Malos, Malos & Mythra, Mithos & Chara, kratos/anna
Series: don't you worry child [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1414204
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	you could say something poetic about the past clinging like a cape or you could just admit nightmares blow and trauma isn't fair

**Author's Note:**

> housekeeping: hi, DYWC is mostly self indulgent crossover shenanigans, i hope you enjoy,
> 
> Kratos, Anna, and Mithos are all from YWKON*, which is a ToS/XC2 crossover of a sort. Short explanation of YWKON* [here](https://rarsneezes.dreamwidth.org/24351.html). (*they're actually from an AU of YWKON. i'm living my best life.)
> 
> Also teams M and M2 combined off screen and then split in _Shadow: retreive your power limiters_. me? write in chronological order? absolutely not. i skipped like three scenes. i'm not sorry. 
> 
> **content warnings: brief suicidal ideation. explicit references to past physical abuse.** spoilers: Bro isn't actually here, though, so Dave's completely safe. He's just jumpy, but that's valid.

The whole “not dreaming” thing took Dave a while to get used to. Honestly, it took most of the Sburb (and Sgrub) babies a while to get used to. Even before the game started, Prospit and Derse claimed their dreams, whether they’d Woken Up yet or not. And after Prospit and Derse were destroyed, there were the dream bubbles, and… Well, it wasn’t until the game was finally, actually over, that any of them got to experience what it was like to sleep like normal human beings (or trolls).

And the thing about normal dreams that was weirdest, to Dave, was that there were some nights where you just wouldn’t dream at all.

Well okay the fancy scientists with degrees who also all died on Earth said that you _did_ dream every night, you just didn’t _remember_ it, but still. Even in the three years it’d been since they’d won the game and Sburb was officially over, Dave still thought the not being able to recall his dreams every morning was kind of weird. And _he_ wasn’t like Jade or Terezi, who spent most of their sleeping hours well before the game started dicking around on Prospit. He was just Dave, who spent an unreal amount of time in dream bubbles, and still adjusting to the concept of _not_ going somewhere when he laid down and fell asleep at night. But since there were no eldritch gods hanging around to spit those dream bubbles up anymore, it was just normal dream town for him.

It was also normal dream town, because whatever the hell dimension he’d gotten dragged to _definitely_ did not have Prospit, or Derse, or dream bubbles, or any concept of Sburb at all.

So: not remembering his dreams was weird.

And nightmares? He could really do without the nightmares.

That was another nice thing about knowing where you’d go where you dreamt every night. Sure, Derse was kind of a nightmare of its own ( _especially when Lil Cal was there, ugh, Dave shudders to think about that_ ), but it was a nightmare with its own logic and rules, even if that logic was fucked up wack and really needlessly antagonistic. But once you knew the rules, it made _sense._ Even the _dream bubbles_ made more sense than normal dreams did! They were just a place to exist, crafted from memories and doomed timelines, and sure you could accidentally walk into a bad memory but it was just—scenery, a set drop with no actors. Or, there _were_ actors, but they were like real life actual actors, real people with their own thoughts and feelings, not some weird splintered part of your psyche created by your dreaming subconscious for you to have a nonsensical conversation with. The people in the dream bubbles were _real people._ Ghosts, sure, but _real._

Anyway all that to say Dave is pretty sure he’s having a nightmare right now.

First of all for all the dream bubbles were weird mismatches of memories from a thousand dying timelines, they always looked like quilt squares sewn together. The world would stop being one place and suddenly start being another between steps. _This_ place that Dave’s currently walking through looks more like one of John’s B-movie horror films had fucked LOHOC and together they had a weird mutilated baby in which the floor is literally lava but the walls are too dark and too close, with oppressive camera angles like his dream wants to be one of those old PS1 horror games that Rose likes so much. It’s stressful as shit!!

Also Bro’s here.

Prospit? Derse? Dream bubbles? Those were all restricted to Sburb players _only,_ and Bro wasn’t one of those. For that same reason Rose never saw her mom in dream bubbles, John never saw his dad, Jade never saw her grandpa. It was just them and a bunch of dead kids from other sessions. And that was nice. Knowing Bro was dead and even his ghost couldn’t show up when Dave went to sleep.

But real, normal dreams aren’t as kind. So Bro’s here and he… Man, Dave doesn’t even _know._ Normal dreams don’t make any _sense,_ either, so it’s kind of just a stressful tension trip, sword in his hands even though it makes him feel sick, checking over his shoulder as well has he can while the camera angles are out to get him, jumping from furniture to furniture to avoid the lava and knowing for _sure_ that Bro is gonna catch up any second now. Of course he will. He’s _Bro._ He’s probably waiting just up ahead to kick Dave’s ass and scold him for not watching all his corners as if Dave could possibly watch his corners in this kind of environment, and really he shouldn’t have to expect his so-called brother to sneak attack him in the first place and—

Dave wakes up.

Dave wakes up not exactly like he’s _startled_ out of a bad dream, but definitely like he’d just had one. Kratos watches the boy silently for a moment, wondering if it’s worth intervening, waiting to see if Dave intends to just roll over and go back to sleep. It’s nearing sunrise, but Kratos is the only one awake right now. Anna sleeps like the dead, and Mithos is asleep for the express purpose of making sure Chara’s dreams aren’t too hard on them. It’s funny, how much Mithos will protest that he doesn’t care, and then also immediately throw himself into his driver’s nightmares to diffuse them. It’s interesting, too, to see how much Mithos has grown to care for this human.

Back to Dave, though. Looks like he doesn’t intend on going back to sleep, given the way he sits up. There’s a tension knotted in his shoulders, and though he groans only like waking from a bad nap, Kratos can see Dave subtly scan the area for threats, and then _double-check_. In the time Kratos has traveled with Dave, though he knows Dave to be a very cautious warrior—always making sure he knows where everyone and everything is at all times—he’s never seen Dave _double-check._ Once is usually enough to satisfy him.

Must’ve been some dream.

“Dave?” Kratos calls out, quietly, not moving from where he sits. Better that Dave knows he’s here and awake than him accidentally taking Dave by surprise. Dave’s attention snaps to him a touch too fast, and though he seems to relax a fraction once he realizes who it is, it’s _only_ a fraction.

“Hey,” Dave answers, near monotone. And then, a little sharper: “ _Shit_.”

Why is Dave watching his back like he expects someone to jump out and attack him any second now?

“Dave…” Kratos says, slowly. “Is everything alright?” Has Dave sensed something that Kratos cannot? The ambient ether sings of peace and no monsters, but given all they have seen, Kratos wouldn’t be entirely surprised by a new threat that moves without disturbing the ambient ether.

Dave slides to his feet, silent and practiced, preparing himself for a battle only he feels coming, preparing himself like if he makes a noise first that’ll be the end of him. Worry spikes in Kratos’ core, but he stays very still. If Dave does not think it wise to make too much noise, then Kratos will follow his lead. Though Kratos wonders—not unfairly, he thinks—if Dave isn’t just hypervigilant after whatever nightmare he had. Kratos knows he himself is prone to be… to put it kindly, an absolute disaster, after his worst nightmares. They can make him hypervigilant for days even within the safety of his own home. And here, in an unfamiliar place…

( _Kratos would be calmed by the stars, the obvious signs of freedom. But Dave isn’t Kratos._ )

And maybe, since Dave is so intent on being quiet, Kratos shouldn’t press, _but_ if there is actually a threat, they need to communicate with each other.

“Do you sense something?” Kratos asks.

“His eyes on my fucking neck, where is he,” Dave answers, and that doesn’t even make a little bit of sense. Dave is scanning the area a little less subtly now, like he doesn’t love what he’s seeing. They’re in a field, a sparse forest in the distance well beyond Dave, mountains rising somewhere far behind Kratos. They’d all said it was a fine place to stop, last night, but Dave… “Goddammit it’s too fucking open, where is he hiding? Probably turned himself invisible, knowing Bro, god. Not that it matters, I guess! He’s never when I expect him to be! Fucking hell I’m gonna be sick I hate these games.”

Kratos blinks several times in confusion.

“What,” he says. And then: “Who?”

“Bro,” Dave says, like it means something.

“Your… brother?” Kratos guesses, numbly. That does not sit kindly with the rest of what Dave has just said.

“He,” Dave starts, and then stops. He swings his attention towards Kratos, and—it’s so hard to tell, has always been hard to tell, when he’s wearing those sunglasses. ( _How… can Dave even see anything right now, actually. Even if the sun is starting to rise, that cannot possibly be enough light when Dave is covering his eyes._ ) But anyway, Kratos can taste the moment where Dave really appreciates that his traveling companions exist in the same space as him right now. Dave goes rigid, fists clenching at his sides. “I have to go.”

Kratos is so thoroughly lost.

“Wait, why?” he asks, an urgency ringing in his gut.

“I have to go,” Dave repeats, not nearly enough words to fill an empty space, not for Dave. He always talks too much. Now he’s barely talking at all. “If he’s—hell, he’s gonna hurt you. I have to go.”

Kratos gets to his feet, not as fast as he would like to, trying to move slow so it won’t startle Dave. Every second is precious, though. Every second before Dave leaves.

“I think we can handle…” Kratos begins, but fumbles, because he doesn’t know quite the threat Dave is speaking of. If it’s just one man, though—( _and doesn’t your world shift uncomfortably, Kratos, at the notion of a boy being terrified of a man he calls brother, does this not feel just a little bit too much like the way that Lloyd from another universe clammed up when you grabbed him unexpectedly_ )—then surely, the five of them combined… The numbers are well in their favor, especially when considering his own and Mithos’ strength, _and_ Dave’s control over time. He opens his mouth to articulate that aloud, but doesn’t get the chance.

“No you fucking can’t, you have no idea what Bro is like,” Dave spits. “And no alright I don’t fucking know what he’s like either when it comes to collateral damage because there’s never fucking been collateral _to_ damage and—god if he—god, fuck.” Dave’s attention swings away from Kratos, like he heard a noise, like he felt something. Kratos heard nothing. Kratos felt nothing. Again, the question: can Dave sense something Kratos cannot, or are Dave’s senses tricking him?

“Dave,” Kratos tries again, gentle as he can manage right now when his heart is in his throat. “I think we will be okay, that we can handle any threat that comes at us, including…” The words get caught, not enough knowledge to have the confidence to call a stranger he is only just hearing of with the same familiarity that Dave does, especially when the concept of this man has already been tainted with Dave’s apparent fear of violence. “Including this one. We—”

Time stops. Time restarts.

Dave is gone.

Words splutter and die in Kratos’ throat as he processes this, and then processes what that _means._ “Shit,” he says. He could sit here and replay where exactly this went wrong, but honestly he doesn’t think he could have possibly done anything differently to make Dave stay.

Fretting over the past isn’t going to matter, anyway. He can’t go back and change it.

( _Could Dave? Somehow, Kratos doesn’t think so… He does not know Dave’s exact limits, but he’s heard Dave grumble about stable timeloops enough to know there_ are _very strict rules Dave is bound to._ )

Anyway, the only thing to do now is find Dave. Hopefully he hasn’t gone too far.

Time ( _ha_ ) to wake everyone else up. Kratos moves to Mithos, first, and… hesitates, for a second, but this will be faster, and while haste probably won’t be enough to catch up to a frightened boy who has control over the flow of time, it’s the only tool they _do_ have.

( _He tries not to think about how long Dave has been alone, panicking over a threat that Kratos isn’t even sure is tangible, time stopped around him._ )

It’s faster, so Kratos reaches and places fingertips to Mithos’ core crystal, sending him a data package that contains all of the relevant info on the current situation, filled in with Kratos’ memories of the past two minutes. Less talking, that way, if Mithos receives that information in the dreamspace, and then relays it to Chara. And this way is less likely to startle either of them.

That just leaves Anna.

The good news is that while successfully and quickly waking Anna at home is something of a coin toss, while traveling she gets up with no fuss closer to three out of four times. Kratos sits next to her and reaches over to jostle her by the shoulder, urgent, and strike his fingers against her skin ( _not enough to hurt, just enough to notice_ ) three times—a signal that it’s urgent, for when words are unwise or simply too slow. He’ll still have to explain when she’s up, but…

Her eyes snap open instantly, the emotion bleed between them flaring to life and free of any panic or confusion, meaning they’re going to skip the step where it takes her a second or two to realize where she is and who’s touching her. Good. More precious time saved. “What’s wrong?” she hisses, voice quiet.

“Dave’s gone,” Kratos answers, at a normal volume.

Anna scowls, then sits up to check. “Where’d he go?”

“Good question.”

Anna raises her eyebrows at him, and Kratos admits now isn’t the time to be joking around.

“From what I know,” Kratos explains, “he woke up from a bad dream and panicked and stopped time to… run, I assume. I don’t know what he did while time was stopped.”

Anna groans, runs a hand over her face. “Fuck, he _stopped time,_ huh,” she mutters. “Who knows how far he got.”

“Right,” Kratos says, already tired. He tries to sharpen that tiredness into determination, that worry into action. Anna’s own determination echoing in his core helps, at least.

“D’you know what he was panicking about?”

“He felt like someone was watching him, about to attack,” Kratos answers. It’s true, but not the whole truth. The whole truth—or, the whole of what Kratos knows, which he feels is probably only the tip of the iceberg—can wait until after: “Do you sense anything?”

Anna takes a moment, silent, to think it over. Slowly, she shakes her head. “No…”

“I don’t, either,” Kratos says. He turns over his shoulder to look at Mithos—who has woken up, by now. “Mithos?” he asks.

Mithos shakes his head without any hesitation. “Ambient ether’s clear.”

“I’m not a good judge,” Chara says, immediately, before anyone asks. They’re scowling in the dim morning light, either hating being awake, or hating the situation, or the words they’re having to say. It’s hard to tell. Kratos does not know them very well, yet. They hiss at expectant eyes on them. “I’m just- already constantly paranoid, even at home,” they answer, somewhat stiffly. “So me feeling like something’s there is just. Me. Not any real indication, I think.”

“I still think you’re probably right about Dave overreacting from the nightmare, though,” Mithos says.

“I didn’t say overreacting,” Kratos counters.

“Still, unless that guy Dave’s so worried about jumping him can manage to move around _without_ disturbing the ambient ether…” Mithos argues.

“Why don’t you be useful and tell us where he went,” Anna says, her smile sharp, and Kratos lets her have that because they _are_ short on time here. ( _They are perpetually short on time, because time is on Dave’s side, not theirs._ )

Mithos scowls, sighs dramatically, but answers: “Five hundred meters out, that direction, I think,” he says, pointing to the west. “There was _something_ there, anyway, but it’s much harder to track locations of _time_ related events, given time and space are diametrically opposed. Time’s kind of _everywhere,_ so—”

“A lead’s a lead,” Kratos says counter to Mithos’ grumbling.

Anna pushes herself to her feet, offering a hand out to Kratos. He takes it to pull himself up—not that he needed it, but it’s always nice to indulge in the physical contact whenever he can stand it. She squeezes his hand once, reassuring, and only then does Kratos properly note the roaring worry in his core. Did Anna really notice it before he did?

He squeezes her hand back, lets it go. Not really a good way to walk, if they want to be fast.

( _He reminds himself that Mithos is probably right. The man Dave calls Bro would have to be another kind of threat entirely to avoid disturbing the ambient ether at all. And if he and Dave really are brothers, then Bro avoiding disturbing the ether when Dave does not seems unlikely._

 _And, even if Bro_ is _here, somehow, then he has only as much of an idea of where Dave is as they do, and nothing more._

 _And, despite Dave’s worry, Kratos is quite certain that one man against himself and Anna and Mithos is not going to win any fights._ )

“For the record,” Kratos says, low, as they start walking. He’s in step with Anna, while Chara and Mithos follow somewhere behind. Mithos already knows because it was in the data package Kratos sent to him, and chances are Mithos told Chara, so that just leaves Anna as the only one who still needs to know. “So you aren’t blindsided…”

“Mmhmm?”

There’s a quiet bubble of dread in the emotion bleed, as Anna tastes Kratos’ own sorrow and must decide she’s not excited to hear it. Kratos can’t blame her.

“I… didn’t get a lot of information out of Dave before he bolted,” Kratos says, slowly, the words heavy. “But what I did get implies that the man he’s so worried about attacking him is his brother.”

Anna doesn’t stagger, but she almost does, especially as she turns to look at Kratos with abject horror on her face. The horror becomes sharp sorrow, then exhaustion, a perfect match to what Kratos is feeling, singing in tandem in their chests.

“Yeah,” Kratos says.

“Great,” Anna says, monotone and tight, clearly sarcastic.

“And with… everything else I know about Dave…” ( _Dave’s voice plays back in memory, monotone and winding until he runs out of breath, about how he doesn’t hate being touched exactly but will definitely turn his sword on anyone who sneaks up on him just on reflex, and Kratos hates to imagine the picture where that is Dave’s first reflex and also not a reflex that got him out of the situation that honed said reflex to_ _begin with_.) “I get the feeling that it wouldn’t be a large leap of logic to assume he probably grew up dealing with that… on a somewhat constant basis.”

( _It puts Dave’s fear of swords into uncomfortable perspective, a well._ )

Tired sorrow snaps into anger in Anna’s chest, and Kratos breathes in the wake of it. Her strides get a little longer, fists clenching at her sides.

“I almost,” she says, sharp and unkind, “hope the asshole _is_ here, just so I can kick his ass for that.”

If Kratos said the blood and ether in his veins didn’t sing with the same desire, he’d be lying.

Mithos gladly lets Kratos and Anna lead the way, knowing that as far as this goes… they’re going to be way better at talking Dave down from a panic attack than he is. Sure, if Mithos _can_ handle it if he needs to—he’s talked Kratos down after a million nightmares ( _though he’s not as good as Anna is at it, apparently, yes he is still bitter_ ) and he’s definitely butted heads with alternate-universe Lloyd over alternate-universe-asshole-Kratos-who-is-both-of-their-Father, and whether or not his actions or picking fights with his son was ever justified—but, anyway. Dave isn’t Lloyd and Dave isn’t his driver as Lloyd was at the time, _Chara_ is his driver, and…

Well, Chara isn’t doing hot right now, if their tight hold on the emotion bleed is telling Mithos anything, and frankly it’s telling Mithos a lot. He understands, though. He’s seen their nightmares in the dreamspace, he saw how they reacted when they heard exactly what the situation with Dave is. They said they really wanted to engage with this as little as possible, and Mithos isn’t about to turn down a request from his driver like that.

( _He likes Chara… like a lot… but also if Anna’s taught him anything it’s that skirting around a clearly stated boundary like that makes him an asshole so like… He’ll give that Father-forsaken part of his core that wants to whisk Chara away from here an inch or two and make sure Kratos and Anna handle this, which they should be more than capable of doing, and he and Chara can hang back._ )

Except.

“Hey, wait,” Mithos says, and he stops.

Kratos and Anna turn around to look at him. Chara stops and scowls at him. Mithos barely pays attention, though, frowning at the anomaly they’ve just walked past, stepping slowly towards it. “Kratos, how did you not sense this…?” he asks, under his breath, but is too distracted to hear Kratos’ answer. The ether here is… has been shifted… has…

Mithos reaches out and touches it. It feels _wrong bad don’t enter_ but—he takes the ether and he shifts it just a little, tells it to _behave,_ and that’s not enough to get his hand to slide into the barrier, but it is enough for the distortion to reveal what it was hiding.

Dave.

It was hiding Dave.

“Oh,” Mithos says, taking a step back.

Dave’s floating in midair, head hugged against his knees, fingers gripped tightly in his own hair, completely frozen, like time has simply Stopped for him. Sharp discomfort slides down Mithos’ throat, and without looking he can tell that Chara has looked away, taken a few steps back. Mithos reaches out towards Dave again, but the results are the same as last time. His fingers stop against some kind of barrier almost an armslength away from Dave.

So, correction: Dave has stopped time for himself and the immediate surrounding area.

Kratos walks up next to Mithos, squinting worried at the boy isolated in a bubble of frozen time. Mithos avoids making a face, but barely. What _is_ with Kratos and just adopting any kid he’s spent like a day with?

“Dave…?” Kratos calls.

No response.

“Probably can’t hear us,” Mithos deduces. “Or anything else for that matter.”

“Hmm,” Kratos says.

“Hold on, let me try something,” Mithos says. Kratos and Anna might be better at the whole having-a-reasonable-conversation-about-emotions thing, but neither of them can do ether manipulation on this scale, for obvious reasons.

Not that… Mithos is an Aegis right now, exactly. The longer he’s in these worlds, the more and more he becomes aware of that. Oh, his actual power and ether output hasn’t changed at all! But the ether here does not listen to him like the ether back home does. It will not bend to his whims and—maybe controlling _time_ is something he could only do with Martel’s help, anyway, but either way…

Mithos isn’t really surprised that despite his pushing, Dave’s bubble does not collapse at all.

“Well?” Anna asks, always impatient. He hates that he’s gotten used to that from her.

“I’m going to have to ping one of the other Aegises,” Mithos says, and he calls them that deliberately, _other_ Aegises, not real Aegises. Probably the admins of this network, which is why it listens to them, and not to him. But it’s not a question of real or fake, just location. Thankfully being an Aegis—regardless of network—still means he can be way more sophisticated about getting their attention than shouting into the air and hoping they hear, like Anna’s prone to do.

( _In her defense, Malos has yet to not respond to her._ ) ( _And he says he doesn’t care._ )

He pings Mythra, because as much as he likes Malos—he likes _his_ Malos, and the Malos here is… Obnoxious, and hard to watch, most of the time. It’s like night and day, between the two of them. This Malos is hardened by grief and a horrible driver and… Mithos can’t _blame_ him, but he’d still rather talk to Mythra if he could. Besides, Dave is Mythra’s responsibility, if he has his math right on who’s in charge of what “team”, even if the concept of teams has at this point degraded nearly beyond recognition.

Still, he pings Mythra.

It takes her only a second to show up, not existing in their space one minute, existing it in the next.

“Yo,” she begins, then stops, looks at Dave. “Oh. God, why can’t we have _normal_ problems,” she huffs. “You know how he got like this?”

“He was like this when we got here,” Chara answers, distantly, helpfully.

“Probably having a panic attack,” Anna adds, her voice a little quieter; grim but full of sympathy.

Mythra lets out a long sigh, pouting like she doesn’t want to be dealing with this, or maybe just isn’t sure how to. “Okay,” she says, shifting ever so slightly, like she’s trying not to advertise how uncomfortable she is. “Let’s see if I can get him out of there so you guys can talk to him, I guess.”

She reaches out to touch the bubble of solidified time, and Mithos feels the ether around her pull like it’s _supposed_ to, and he tries not to feel jealous. Calculations done, Mythra pushes changes gently into the ether, and then—they all catch. Not because Mythra doesn’t have the power to manipulate this universe. It’s just time itself is out of her jurisdiction.

Dave is the master of time, here. No one else.

That doesn’t stop Mythra from summoning her sword and bashing it against the bubble surrounding Dave like it’s going to help.

( _It doesn’t._ )

( _Probably for the best. Mithos thinks if that had worked, Dave would have just repeated the action the moment he processed Mythra’s sword._ )

“Okay,” Mythra says again as she dismisses her sword, clearly frustrated but obviously too worried to let that stop her. “I think… he’s going to have to undo this himself.” Her face says she doesn’t like that conclusion, doesn’t like that it means she can’t do anything quick and easy to fix this. “But… Hold on,” she says.

The ether pings in a way Mithos can feel, though only an echo of. Calling her siblings’ attentions, if he had to wager. He’s pretty sure it’s got words attached to it, words played back, but he isn’t privy to those.

There’s a few seconds of nothing, then the ether shifts, and— _aw, hell._ Malos steps into the world, and Mithos scowls, though it’s not… it’s not _Malos’_ fault he’s an entirely different Malos than the one Mithos knows, the one Mithos likes. He doesn’t turn around to see but he _feels_ Chara look at him, feels gentle concern across the emotion bleed, and Mithos tries not to melt under it. He sends them back silent reassurance that he’s okay, they’ve had this discussion before—it’s not _fun,_ interacting with this Malos, but it’s nothing he’s going to fall to pieces over.

Anyway.

Malos takes one look at Dave, then turns to raise his eyebrows at Mythra—he raises them so high it’s a wonder they don’t just start floating off his face. “I’m sorry, you want _me_ to do this?” he asks, incredulous.

“To be fair, I _did_ ping Pyra, too,” Mythra argues, hot. “It’s not my fault she didn’t answer.”

“You pinged me and Pyra but not—”

“Alvis is the worst out of all of us when it comes to talking to people and you know it.”

Malos opens his mouth. Shuts his mouth. Drags his hands down his face with a quiet, deeply felt _fuck me._

“Hey, can the two of you stop bitching at each other and tell us the plan, maybe,” Anna snaps, and Mithos is glad that she did, or he was about to, but he’s already backed away from Dave and the other Aegises to be closer to Chara, and…

“Oh,” Mythra says, like that hadn’t occurred to her. “Sorry, yeah, I’m pretty sure me or one of my siblings can get _in_ there to talk to him, but.” She stops here, blushes faintly—on her, it’s the same color it is for humans, despite her emerald core crystal, which is still weird as hell to Mithos—ducking her head down. “Well I’m. I’m just, uh, _really_ bad at…”

“You say as if I’m not just as prone to destroying everything I fucking touch,” Malos counters into Mythra’s silence, and Anna flinches.

( _She holds her mouth shut, though. Mithos can tell she wants to protest, but she doesn’t. He can tell she wants to argue this until her throat is sore, because that’s the face of her father and it hurts her more than anyone else to hear him speak like this about himself—but it’s not actually her father. Funhouse mirror reflections from another universe; same face, different man._

 _Mithos hates it, too._ )

“You at least had Torna,” Mythra shouts, oblivious to anyone that isn’t her and Malos. “And all of you—Well, never mind. You all probably just avoided talking to each other about your problems and trauma at literally all costs, didn’t you!”

“We did, thank you!” Malos agrees.

( _They’re disasters, the both of them._ )

“God, fuck,” Mythra spits.

“Still no Pyra,” Malos whines, as if this whole time he’s just been stalling for his younger sister to save him.

There’s silence, for a minute. Chara mutters something under their breath about how this is ridiculous, and Mithos only just keeps from snorting so loud everyone swings their attention to him. But Kratos and Anna are doing that silent-talking-with-only-raised-eyebrows thing and Mythra and Malos are playing chicken with each other, so…

“Paper rock scissors, if you win I’ll go,” Malos says, finally, cracking first. “But _no_ foresight, you ass, that’s cheating.”

“Okay, okay!”

It takes them about ten seconds. Mythra wins.

Malos glares at her, and boy, if looks could kill. “You _sure_ you didn’t cheat?” he asks, and there’s a promise of violence in his tone, even though now isn’t the fucking time.

“She didn’t use foresight,” Mithos interjects, raising his voice enough it’ll carry over the distance. “You and I both would have felt the ether shift if she had.” He thinks that’s true, anyway. He doesn’t care. He would promise Mythra didn’t cheat even if she had, just to get this over with faster. And Malos doesn’t try and argue Mithos’ logic, so either Mithos is right, or Malos decided to believe him.

( _Mithos hates to be mean, but Malos knows… approximately nothing about actually being an Aegis. It’s almost funny._ )

“I hate you all,” Malos says, and then slams his hand against the crystalized bubble of time, ether shifting as he reaches for Dave through the barrier. His eyes glaze over, his core crystal shining brilliant and purple.

Let it be known: Malos has no idea what the _fuck_ he’s doing.

But like? Talking to this kid for two seconds to convince him to stop time bubbling so someone _else_ can help… That… God, he hopes he won’t fuck it up. He wishes Jin were here. But then, wishing Jin were here has been a constant occurrence in Malos’ life ever since Jin died and he didn’t.

He tries… not to think about it.

Anyway, getting the kid out of the time bubble. All he has to do is not yell and make things worse. Great plan. Definitely something he’s going to fuck up. But Mythra’d probably fuck it up just as bad, so like. Whatever. Makes sense that Mythra’d want to make it so someone else could take the blame when things go wrong.

( _He hates Mythra for this, just a little._ )

The weirdest thing about this though is that, though Dave looks up at him when he suddenly starts existing in Dave’s—dreamspace? Consciousness? Slice of sectioned off time? Whatever—Dave doesn’t look _surprised._ He raises his hand in a lazy wave, feet swinging beneath him on the… the _thing_ he sits on. Malos isn’t sure what to place it as, right away. It’s kind of like a bed, emblazoned with the same clockwork gear symbol on Dave’s shirt, done in the same colors, but it’s got pillars rising up from each of the four corners, and it looks like it’s made of fucking _stone_? Some kind of shitty bed. Why does it look more like a weird altar? Malos doesn’t like that.

Humans have… some fucked up kind of humor.

Other than the weird bed-altar-stone thing Dave’s sitting on, this space is completely empty save only for the distant sound of a clock tick tick ticking all around them.

“You, uh, ain’t surprised I’m here?” Malos asks, forgetting everything else.

Dave shrugs. “Nah. Like I know it ain’t dream bubble bullshit, but it feels enough like dream bubble bullshit I’m just gonna roll with it. You gonna stand there like an ass or you gonna sit down?”

Malos raises his eyebrows. “You _want_ me to sit?” he asks, because, alright. Literally no one here knows about the whole _Aegis of Destruction_ bullshit other than his siblings, but it’s still weird as fuck for no one to know that. It’s even weirder for them to treat him like he isn’t a bull in a china shop, about to destroy literally anything if he so much as breathes on it.

“Feels kinda weird if you don’t but hey man I’m not gonna police you, you do you,” Dave answers.

For now, Malos stands.

Not that he’s standing on anything in particular. He’s just standing on a solidified chunk of space that exists for the sole purpose of being for him to stand on. If Malos were anyone other than himself, he might think it weird that this physical representation of Dave’s subconscious manifested only in the weird stone bed and the ticking clock, but Malos _is_ himself, and last time he spent any time dicking around in the physical representation of his own subconscious, it had only just manifested stars in an otherwise void, inky blackness. So.

“This is about the bubble, isn’t it?” Dave asks, and Malos breathes a subtle sigh of relief, because thank fuck he hopes Dave keeps doing all the legwork for him.

“Yeah,” Malos says.

Dave sighs long and slow, sliding his hands up his face, dislodging the sunglasses he wears as he drags his fingers across his skin. “Look,” he mumbles, into his hands, which given they’re in Dave’s subconscious, Malos can still hear loud and clear. “I just needed a few minutes where I could fucking breathe without feeling Bro’s eyes on my neck. Or maybe I needed more than a minute. I don’t know.” Malos doesn’t know if Dave’s been here longer than a minute. He’s uncomfortably aware that Dave knows, though. Dave knows exactly how long he’s been here. “God, fuck me, I don’t wanna come out,” Dave says, dropping his hands from his face. This is basically a dream, so his sunglasses fall perfectly back onto his face. “Like literally the last thing I want to do is that. I’d rather swim in fucking lava. I’d rather fight Lord fucking English again. Anything but Bro. I can’t—”

The not-a-dream shifts, stone bed becoming the roof of a high-rise building like from Morytha—or, from old Earth, Malos guesses. Wait.

He squints at the city as it takes shape below them. Is this Texas? And how the fuck does he know what a Texas is?

Anyway: high-rise apartment building, Dave sitting on the edge of the roof, an unrealistically oppressive sun beating down on them from above. That’s cheery.

“Hah,” Dave laughs, sharp and unamused. “Guess this really is like the dream bubble bullshit. Ugh. Last place I wanna be is here, too. Wonder what’d happen if I just kind of…” He starts as he leans forward to consider the drop below, and then doesn’t continue the thought aloud, and Malos doesn’t have the chance to really process or consider the fact that Dave might have just joked about committing suicide in the dreamspace ( _it doesn’t work like that, at least_ ) because something

_Moved_

Behind him.

Malos whirls around, sword solidifying in his hand as he searches for the threat, but ether’s fucky in dreamspaces and what the fuck, Malos was pretty sure they weren’t supposed to manifest anything else that was living.

He can’t fucking see anything there, though, just feel the sensation of it crawling down his spine, like he’s being watched, from somewhere, by someone.

( _Feels… kind of the same way being in resonance with Amalthus did, actually. Yeuck._ )

“Hey, uh,” Malos says, because maybe Dave should know that there’s apparently some other fucker in the dreamspace with them. But when he looks over his shoulder, he sees how tense Dave’s shoulders have gotten, and he thinks Dave already knows.

“Sorry,” Dave says. “Bro doesn’t normally come with the scenery, but I think it’s. I think it’s just that.” He isn’t looking at Malos. Why does it suddenly matter to Malos that Dave do something other than stare blankly into the distance, coiled tense like he’s just waiting for the other shoe to drop. _Why does Malos care._ “Hang on, if this works like dream bubbles do, lemme see if I can just…”

The scenery flickers, goes dark, and if this weren’t a dream and Malos weren’t also a darkness blade, the sudden change of lighting would leave him way more disoriented than he actually is, right now. They’re… Fuck, Malos has no idea where this is. Inside like, a ship, maybe? Underground? It’s dark and there’s machinery whirring, and after a second there’s splashes of color, rugs and couches, and Dave is sitting at a barstool at some counter, his back still to Malos even though the counter is between them.

There’s still some kind of sensation of being watched, but it’s way less oppressive, and Dave has relaxed considerably. Interesting.

( _The clock… hasn’t stopped ticking, Malos realizes._ )

“There we go,” Dave says. “If you hear a clown honk ignore it, otherwise we’re totally chill here.”

“You sure about that?” Malos asks. “Not questioning your judgement, kid, but…” Why does he care. Why does he care.

“Sure. I stopped time, and we’re just chilling in my head, right?” Dave answers, like that isn’t a really weird set of words to come out of a human’s mouth in a coherent phrase like that. “Bro can’t like. I know he can’t get in here. Not for real. He can do a lot of bullshit crazy impossible things but he can’t—he can’t control time. I can. So.”

He sounds so calm, which is still kind of wild considering the fact Mythra warned Malos that Dave might be having a panic attack in here. But he’s… entirely in his own element, unbothered.

Malos hates that he can kind of see the appeal of hiding around forever in somewhere you are completely certain is one-hundred-percent safe.

He still… doesn’t exactly know where to go from here, wishes again that Jin could give him advice, or do it for him ( _Jin was great with kids, and with the rest of Torna, even if the rest of Torna weren’t really… kids, despite being ages younger than himself and Jin_ ). Anyway. Anyway. Malos sighs, long and slow, then makes his way across the room. The moment he’s closer, Dave nonchalantly pats the seat next to him, so, alright. Fine. Malos sits down.

“When you say ‘Bro’, do you mean…?” he finds himself asking, though he isn’t sure how to finish the sentence. His concept of siblings is still kind of fuzzy, because his own siblings are kind of unorthodox, but. Despite how much he and Mythra end up at each other’s throats, there’s still a difference between that and being so terrified of the prospect of facing your brother that you lock yourself in a frozen slice of time… right?

“Like my brother, yeah,” Dave answers, his shoulders rigid again. “Look, man, I really don’t wanna empty that basket laundry all over the floor. Just… You know…” He shrugs. “Sometimes… the person who was supposed to take care of you… doesn’t.”

Malos thinks about how drivers are supposed to look after their blades. Malos thinks about how Amalthus decidedly did not do that.

“…yeah,” Malos answers, quiet.

Dave laughs; self-deprecating, but not unkind. “Cheers man, I’ll drink to that,” he says, his grin bright when he turns it on Malos. From out of nowhere, he summons a bottle of—is that apple juice?—and takes a swig. Malos waits, eyebrows raised, for: “Eugh,” Dave says, though he doesn’t splutter, just looks disappointed. “Tastes like nothing.”

“Dreamspace does that,” Malos says, deadpan. ( _Much to Pyra’s immense dissatisfaction, but really, what’s the point of cooking in the dreamspace, anyway?_ )

“Damn,” Dave says, then chucks the bottle over his shoulder into the mess of a room behind them. It hits—something, and. Whatever. Dave can do whatever the hell he wants in his own head, Malos guesses.

Everything but stay here forever.

“You uh… planning on leaving sometime soon?” Malos asks.

“Oh.”

Again with the not looking at him. Again with the rigid shoulders, idly swinging feet going completely still.

“I guess I really can’t stay here until I start growing a beard,” Dave admits. “Rose wouldn’t stop making fun of me if that happened and she—well. What she has to say about me being a coward or not she can shove up her ass, but. God.” Dave makes a kind of miserable noise. “I’m _not_ being a coward. I just. I really can’t. Like I said earlier there’s like a metric fuckton of things I’d rather do than face Bro again, including doing a sick Olympics-level high dive routine into the sweet seas of LOHAC’s boiling lava, so like—”

Well, that’s disturbing! Malos tries not to think about it, tries to solve the problem at hand.

“What makes you so certain Bro’s here?” Malos interjects.

Dave stops.

“I. I dunno. You just know, you know? Fuckin sixth sense bullshit.”

If it felt anything like that oppressive, hair-raising, gut wrenching paranoia that permeated the sights of that Texan apartment roof, Malos guesses he can’t really blame Dave for reacting like this. But based on what information Mythra is quietly pinging him about the situation as Dave’s teammates understand it… Malos thinks of how Patroka’s worst days always came after her worst nights, how even Akhos went from obnoxious to unbearable if he had to endure even the slightest nightmare, and:

“You sure you aren’t just overreacting because you had a nightmare?” Malos asks.

“Hey, man, low blow.” And Malos thinks, if Dave’s tone wasn’t always hanging around monotone, he might be snarling right now. “Fuckin Mythra said that she’d dragged all of us from literally whatever point in our timelines y’all ‘needed’—” he says, complete with exaggerated air quotes, “—for your stupid speedrun bullshit so for all I fucking know Bro _could_ be here and it sure as hell _feels_ like he is and so I don’t think this is an overreaction and even if it was it’s not fucking cool to imply a man’s some kind of sissy for perfectly reasonable childhood trauma—”

“We wouldn’t do that,” Malos interjects, offended, focusing on that rather than literally anything else that just came out of Dave’s mouth.

“Man what?” Dave asks, probably too wrapped up in his own nonsense to have quite heard or understood Malos.

“We wouldn’t fucking do that,” Malos repeats. “Sure, I know we’re kind of certified, Grade-A assholes, but we ain’t—fuckin—we wouldn’t bring some asshole here who _actually wanted to hurt you._ ”

( _Okay, Alvis brought Zanza, but that’s besides the point._ )

Dave’s mouth twitches in a way that makes it pretty clear he’s angry, even with the shades covering his eyes, and the dreamspace buckles a little too, snapping with the sudden weight of his anger. “Well how the fuck was _I_ supposed to know that!” he spits. “Patron Aegises? More like high and mighty _assholes,_ y’all don’t tell us _shit,_ leading us around on some kind of fucking string so we do ‘exactly the right thing’ at ‘exactly the right time’”—again, with the air quotes—“Y’all are worse than fucking Vriska! For all I know Bro being here _could_ have been part of your master plan! For all I know me stopping time for precisely twenty-three minutes and seven seconds and some obscene number of specific milliseconds was part of your plan, too—”

“It wasn’t,” Malos says, and tries to bite down the anger bubbling up in his throat, because if he starts shouting this is all going to go to hell in a handbasket and he’s _better than that._ Isn’t he? (He wants to be.)

“ _Then you should fucking tell us that,_ ” Dave spits, and it’s incredible how much one scrawny little kid who’s still sitting on a barstool that doesn’t even let his feet touch the ground can be so intimidating. Malos is an _Aegis,_ he shouldn’t be quaking in his goddamn boots!

( _The voice in Malos’ core that sounds a little bit like Jin tells him it’s not fear, it’s shame, and—_ )

Huffing, Malos pings Alvis for access to the list of people currently within his memory space, taps at his core crystal to project the data for Dave to see—portraits of the twenty-eight assholes ( _thirty-one people, twenty-eight bodies, since some of these assholes are sharing_ ) hanging around in here, complete with names underneath them, sorted by team for convenience, though if Malos wants he could reorder the data by current grouping, or shared point of origin, or alphabetically, or by age, or any number of bullshit things. “List of people who’re here,” Malos explains, grinding his teeth. He owes Dave at least this, even if Dave isn’t even meant to be _his_ responsibility. Mythra better be grateful! “No Bro,” he adds, as if Dave wasn’t already looking, as if Dave could be satisfied by Malos’ words alone.

“No Bro,” Dave repeats, after a few agonizing seconds. He groans and runs a hand through his hair. “Fuckin’ embarrassing. I have _one_ nightmare and then I’m jumpy all day over jack fucking shit, huh? Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be worth booting Sburb back up again just so we can have the horrorterrors spit out some more dream bubbles—hey wait, is that Jade? _Jade’s_ here??”

Malos sighs. He’s going to kill Alvis for this team bullshit, he thinks.

“Yeah, she is,” he says, only just refraining from dragging his hand over his face as he dismisses the data display. Jade Harley’s the only person on there that’s going to interest Dave in this mess—unless Dave cares about the _other_ Kratos. But it’s probably better they don’t open that can of worms, actually.

Dave splutters, spinning in his barstool to better glare at Malos. “And none of y’all patron assholes thought to tell me? I mean of course y’all didn’t, no one wanted to tell Kratos that his wife and brother were here, either, so why would you tell me _Jade_ was here, fucking assholes.”

“Hey, in case you forgot, it was _me_ who made sure my team met up with y’all so Anna could see her husband,” Malos argues. ( _Yeah, he’s definitely gonna kill Alvis for the team bullshit. If he can get his hands on the elusive bastard, anyway. Mythra still hasn’t even hunted him down to punch him like he deserves. Anyway._ ) “So, maybe don’t blame me for this? I’m not even calling the shots here, Alvis is.”

“And does his fucking master plan include me seeing my best friend or nah?” Dave asks.

“I’m sure it does eventually,” Malos answers, bitter.

“Can I see her now? Like I mean come on man if you broke the rules for Anna—I know she’s like your weird alternate universe daughter or whatever—”

“She is not!”

( _She is, but he hates thinking about it, because unfortunately he cannot imagine a universe in which he managed to raise a kid. And also managed to not fuck her up._ )

“Well whatever man can you break the rules for me, too? Just a little? Like come on what’s the point of being one of the assholes in charge if you don’t bend the rules a little come on,” Dave continues, steamrolling right over Malos’ protests. “I haven’t seen Jade in fuckin ages, and it’s the least you owe me—”

Maybe it is. But.

“Shouldn’t we unfreeze time and tell everyone else you’re okay, first?” Malos says.

“Oh,” Dave says. “Oh, shit, yeah. That’d. Yeah.”

He sits in silence for a moment, turning his head away from Malos as he thinks it over. Then he nods.

“Get out of my head so I can unfreeze time, O Patron Asshole,” he says, hopping to his feet.

Malos laughs.

“Yeah, alright.”

And he does.

Dave takes another second after Malos is gone to catch his breath a little further, though at this point he’s just stalling, and he knows it. There ain’t nothing that sitting around here for any longer is gonna do for him, so he might as well rip the bandaid off and just go ahead and hop back into the normal flow of time. The pit in his gut can take a hike, because Bro’s not here, Malos promised, and maybe he doesn’t trust those Patron Assholes more than like half an inch as far as the grand scheme of things go, Malos definitely… sounded like he wasn’t lying. Malos doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who could pull off a lie like that for that long, either.

Also if he stays in here he can’t see Jade, so, he’ll get his ass out of here.

Describing how time works isn’t worth anyone’s (aha) time. Dave just kind of _does_ it, feels it in his gut and pulls the way he’s supposed to, and then time moves for him again, and he—well, it’s like waking up, in a way, like waking up and finding out he’d fallen asleep in the middle of a movie, like fucking Lord of the Rings extended edition except someone swapped discs while he was out so instead of it being the middle of the battle scene he didn’t want to watch it’s just the Hobbits chilling out in that elf city with the water and. And actually that isn’t so bad.

( _He remembers way more about Lord of the Rings than he has any right to, also_.)

Everyone staring at him is kind of embarrassing though.

“A’ight, so, I overreacted and I’m chill now,” Dave says, putting his hands up to hopefully placate them all at once. He tries to ignore the sensation of something like Bro’s fucking smuppets on his neck because _Bro’s dead,_ and he’s been dead for exactly 6 years, 2 months, 18 days, 5 hours, 40 minutes and 9, 10, 11 seconds—( _Not that Dave was_ counting, _he just has no choice knowing anything less than the exact time it’s been for anything, anymore._ )

“That’s good,” Kratos says, and Dave feels a pang of guilt, because for all that it’s only two words out of Kratos’ mouth, Kratos looks so _relieved,_ and _concerned,_ and there’s something else there, something that makes him feel exactly like watching blue text fill his screen as John babbles about his dad, longing but out of place and Dave doesn’t really want to unpack that right now because he has no idea how to cope with an adult figure _caring_ about him, as completely and utterly foreign as it is and. God, Anna’s looking at him with almost the exact same eyes and that’s not anywhere close to fair.

Anna opens her mouth, but Dave doesn’t want to deal with that right now, so he turns to Malos, who was quietly blackflirting—no, bickering, shut up inner Karkat, Malos and Mythra are _siblings_ thanks—with Mythra and demands:

“Yo can I see Jade now?”

“Uh,” Malos says.

“Jade?” Anna asks.

“Yeah, like my friend Jade, fucking best homie in the whole world, Jade,” Dave answers. “Apparently she’s here too and none of the Patron Assholes—” he gets a laugh from Anna and a startled snort out of Mythra for that, which is nice, “—thought to tell me, and they absolutely owe me for making me think Bro was here for a solid thirty-two minutes so pay up dudes. Lemme see Jade.”

“Hold on,” Malos says, and his eyes go distant. Mythra’s do too.

And then: “Jade’s with the other Kratos, right now,” Mythra says. “Dunno if y’all wanna deal with that. Also they’re in the middle of something kind of critical, from the looks of it, so it may have to wait until things settle down on their end.”

“Well, hey, you don’t have to send _us_ to Jade, I know we’d all hate to run into other Kratos again so why don’t you just bring Jade to us?” Dave says, and very carefully does not let his inner-Karkat consider the blackrom potential of watching the two Kratoses go at it because first of all he isn’t into that second of all he really doesn’t want to be thinking about this, that’s weird, this is weird, especially since as much as Kratos is his friend it’s a very different kind of friendship than the one forged by a bunch of dumbass teenagers playing a very horrible game and then getting trapped on a meteor together for three years. Very. _Very_ different.

Where was he.

Oh yeah.

“Unless something’s _stopping_ you from bringing Jade here,” Dave challenges.

“Timing’s off,” Mythra says, and Dave stares at her. “Look I _just_ told you she and her team are in the middle of something, didn’t I? Maybe when they’re done we can grab her, but…”

“Look I can at least get you two a few hours even if we have to send you back to your respective teams afterwards,” Malos says.

“This team thing is bullshit,” Anna argues.

“I know,” Malos agrees.

“Hey if I get to see Jade even for a little bit that’s fine so long as it isn’t the last time I’ll see her again for fucking months,” Dave says. He’d like to see her _now,_ to be honest, because she knows better than anyone else currently here how to get his mind to stop playing him a sweet serenade of Bro’s influence crawling down his spine like a million disgusting spiders, but whatever. “How long ‘til she’s got shit all sorted and she’s free?”

“Don’t know,” Mythra says.

“We’ll keep you posted,” Malos says.

And then they’re both gone.

Dave scowls. “Fuckin assholes,” he grumbles, raking a hand through his hair. He’s gonna give them exactly four hours before he makes like Karkat and pitches a shit or five over not getting his way, but right now he needs to sit down and think about something that _isn’t_ Bro.

So he does that.

He sits down right here in the dirt and casts his attention over to his other two—team members? Sure, fuck it, if that’s the term the Patron Assholes want to use, even though he saw the list and these two aren’t _meant_ to be his team. Anyway. Chara and Mithos, who are hanging out a little further away, talking quietly and. Are they holding hands? No, no, Chara’s doing that thing again where they sit and run their fingers over the ether line things in Mithos’ palm to calm themselves down. Shit, man. Dave hadn’t even thought about how stressful this must’ve been for Chara—like, he knows exactly jack all about their situation for real, but he can guess. They’re just as jumpy as he was at their age. Fuck, Bro was still alive when he was their age—

No, no, not thinking about Bro. Think about how Mithos is absolutely dying the reddest death over there because despite being immortal he’s reacting to a crush exactly the way an immortal teenager would. Dave would know. He spent three years in a meteor full of a bunch of trolls. Dumb, teenage, idiot trolls who were _way_ to horny for their own good. Well Dave probably isn’t completely guiltless on the horny front either but that’s besides the—

Movement. Dave’s head whips around to it, stops. Just Kratos and Anna sitting down.

“Sorry,” Anna says, and makes like she might be about to get back up. “Too close?”

Oh. _Oh._

“No, no, I’m fine,” Dave assures her, immediately. “Just wasn’t paying attention so you startled me I guess? Haha imagine me being startled, god, that nightmare made my brain decide to fucking turn on the faucet for fear juice and flood the bathtub I guess but I’m good I’m good I’m chill.”

He can’t say Anna looks _convinced,_ exactly, but she does finish sitting down. She’s a couple of inches to Kratos’ right, and it’s—always interesting, Dave thinks, always reassuring in a way that makes the first meaningful conversation he had with Kratos click, always makes him ache for the moments, the very rare moments, where Jade or John can tackle him with a hug and it doesn’t make his heart leap up into his mouth. Anyway. Always interesting how much distance Anna will put between herself and Kratos, unless Kratos makes a move to close that distance. He does, this time—reaching over to hold her hand. Disgusting. All this hold handing going on around Dave. Fuckin pornographic. He doesn’t even have anyone he can hold hands with, either!! He’s never been so disappointed in his life.

“Fear juice?” Kratos asks, eyebrows raised.

Oh yeah, those were words Dave said just a second ago.

“Yeah, fear juice, scientifically known as adrenaline,” Dave answers.

Kratos makes a face like he just understood, that long and slow kind of nod with a silent _ohhh_ on his lips. Anna snorts into her free hand. From twenty or so feet away ( _Dave doesn’t know his aspect sure as hell isn’t space_ ) Mithos laughs high and sharp and it’s just—it’s just more background noises to the tune of a stupid teenager with a crush but Dave’s head whips towards the sound anyways, _god_ he hates this. Look at him! Bro’d probably kick his teeth in for being so jumpy, cool guys aren’t _supposed_ to be jumpy, they’re supposed to take their fear and natural reactions to being startled and keep that shit locked up _tight._

And he told himself he wasn’t going to think about Bro but it’s like finding a rabbit hole he trips right into and tumbles and tumbles down like this is SBAHJ and the stairs but not nearly as hilarious but _anyway_ he probably shouldn’t say Bro’d kick his teeth in because teeth don’t fucking grow back. Once teeth are out they’re _out,_ unless they’re baby teeth—Actually did Bro ever kick his _baby_ teeth out? Man who fucking knows, right, certainly not Dave, why would he remember, he was a fucking baby at the time. God, Bro did so much fucked up shit. Literally _who_ throws a baby off a roof, anyway?

Anyway.

Anyway, what was he doing. Finding a reason to stop thinking about Bro, is what he was doing, so he pulls his gaze away from watching Chara and Mithos—not that he was _watching_ them, really, his eyes were just that way while he went on his little Wonderland trip—and back to Kratos and Anna who are still technically sitting with him and hey why do they both look so horrified.

Oh.

Dread settles slowly into Dave’s stomach. His mind spins for something to say, he prays furiously that the one thing that he’s pretty sure just happened didn’t actually just happen.

“Hey,” Anna says, slowly, like the words in her mouth taste about the same way Dave feels about oranges. She leans in slowly, eyes dark with concern. “What the _fuck_?”

Yeah he absolutely did just do the thing where he babbled his thoughts under his breath to himself instead of thinking them all privately in his head like a normal person.

“Aw shit,” Dave says. And then it hits him, kind of like a freight train, what exactly they must’ve just heard him mumble. ( _He’s really,_ really _glad that Chara and Mithos are both out of earshot and distracted, right now. Fuckin kids don’t need to be dragged into this._ ) “Fucking son of a bitch I did the thing where I thought aloud didn’t I.”

Kratos nods, once.

Dave freezes time just long enough to bury his face in his hands and scream for about fourteen seconds straight.

No longer than that, though. If he leaves time frozen any longer then he’s gonna have to deal with Kratos and Anna frozen in their horror and that’s. Again: Parental figures. Caring about him. Not a thing he’s used to. Definitely not something he wants to unpack right now.

Time starts again. Dave throws his hands up in the air and tries not to watch Kratos and Anna too closely.

“A’ight, well, there it is! Look at all my dirty laundry just hanging out the window for y’all to see! Hope you can really get your nose up to it, take in the fucking stench!” He’s babbling, but of course he’s babbling, babbling is all he ever does. “Why am I hanging dirty laundry out the window anyway? Ain’t that where you’re meant to put clean laundry? Well for all the things bro taught me, doing laundry sure as hell wasn’t one of them.”

Anna has a hand pressed over her face, knuckles either digging into her eyes or close to, Dave can’t tell and isn’t looking that closely. He gets the sense that if her other hand wasn’t occupied with tracing the ether lines on the back of Kratos’ hand she might have buried her face in both hands. Anna makes a few noises but can’t seem to make up her mind on them. Kratos, meanwhile, has shifted straight from horrified into… protective? Dave thinks that’s right, Rose’s face has done that before ( _it looks. Way different on trolls._ ) and…

“Dave,” Kratos begins.

Dave puts a hand up, stopping him there. This, _again_ , is not even remotely a thing he wants to try and unpack, especially not while he kind of still feels like Bro is watching him from _fucking somewhere_ and—yeah, well, Dave’s not doing this.

“Don’t, okay, just, it’s fine,” Dave says. “So y’all know and aren’t freaking out dude’s been dead like six years now,” six years and Dave could go down to the millisecond if he wanted again but not right now, “and it’s. I’m alright. And I’ve already had like a million conversations with like a million people,” that’s an overstatement, there are only like twelve of them in the universe left anymore, and _boy isn’t that another thing entirely to unpack_ , “about it being fucked up and my feelings about the matter and I guess I want to say I’ve got my shit all sorted and I don’t really want to talk about it with y’all, I’m cool. Just had a fucking nightmare. And then the Patron Assholes being assholes made me extra jumpy. I’m cool.”

He is also the undeniable king of word vomit. So that’s nice.

Anna drags her hand down her face and then lets it fall into her lap. “Okay,” she says, and she sounds tired… convinced, though. Another sweet score for Dave. “We weren’t going to _make_ you talk, we just…” she shrugs. “Worried.” She smiles for him, but it’s tight, clearly furious. At Bro? Man, Dave does not even have the energy to be mad at Bro, anymore. Shit exhausts him. “Sorry your brother was an asshole, wish I could murder him,” Anna ends on. Kratos makes that face you make when you’re suddenly regretting the fact the love of your life is, in fact, the love of your life.

“Anna,” Kratos scolds, gentle. “Maybe not the time.”

Anna shrugs, unbothered. “Sorry, don’t know how to express affection outside of threatening murder.”

“Yes you do.”

“Get a room before my eyes bleed,” Dave interjects, and Anna laughs, and Kratos starts turning red, and okay, worth it. Definitely better than thinking about Anna’s chances in a fight with Bro and realizing they aren’t that great unless she manages to know shit about swords. Actually fuck it: “Random question Anna do you know shit about swords.”

“Uhhh,” she says, dragging the note out like she does when she wants to answer a question but has to think about it. “I mean yes? Like. Do you mean fighting with swords.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay yes I don’t know shit about swords themselves _but_ ,” Anna says, delighted, and it’s nice to listen to her talk, nice to let her shoot the shit. “Okay so you know—I mean you’ve seen Malos’ sword right?”

“Sure I have, y’all are fucking trigger happy around here,” and he shouldn’t get bitter about that, he brought the topic up.

Anna doesn’t comment on that, at least. “Okay well I realize now that even though I definitely mentioned in my universe Malos is my dad and also my blade you have like zero concept of how drivers work, huh,” Anna says.

“Seeing as it took me like a year of living with trolls to start giving a shit about troll shit instead of letting it just bounce off my ears, yeah I understand the blade thing like not at all,” Dave answers. Why the fuck are they called blades, anyway. Dave absolutely does not get that. “Where are you going with this?”

“Well, Kratos, can you do me fa—” Anna starts, then stops. “Wait. Just kidding.” She holds up a hand as Kratos opens his mouth. “See I realized that was a bad idea before you even said anything. The point is. When you’re driving a blade you can summon their weapon, so: Imagine me with Malos’ fuckoff big sword and then imagine me being _really good at kicking ass with it._ ”

Dave does imagine it, very briefly. Reevaluates his opinions on whether or not Anna could maybe take Bro in a fight and win to “unlikely” to “maybe” but given the only thing that actually managed to beat Bro was _Jack after he fused with Jade’s fucking hellbeast,_ Dave isn’t sure and doesn’t want to keep thinking about it! Time to stop doing that!

Time to do! He isn’t sure!

Maybe answer Anna though so he doesn’t leave her hanging.

“Haha, yeah, alright, pretty sweet mental image,” he admits.

Anna smirks and flexes and Kratos makes that face again like he regrets that he’s married to her, just a little. Fucking gross. Not really. But kind of gross. Dave misses Karkat.

He also misses pesterchum. Like a lot, in general, because honestly he has never had his phone not constantly going off with notifications for somewhere over seven years, he doesn’t wanna calculate that one exactly but he _could_. Anyway. Pesterchum worked in Sburb. And it worked on the meteor, even if they couldn’t pester John or Jade. This is maybe the longest—timeloops nonwithstanding—he’s gone without pesterchum, actually. It’s so quiet? And he misses being able to kind of just… Slide his phone out. Pull it up. Shoot the shit with his friends to distract himself from his thoughts.

But, barring pesterchum, he guesses he’s got… well…

“Hey Anna, you wanna do me a favor?” he asks.

“Sup?” she answers, immediately.

“You wanna tell me like literally everything about how blades work? I literally do not promise I’m going to retain any of that shit but, uh,” Dave stalls here. Blushes a little. Fuck, the shades only cover so much of that. “I dunno your voice is nice to listen to and I want a distraction. You can pick something else to talk about though if you want it literally doesn’t matter to me I just wanna like. Shoot the shit and stop thinking.”

God, that was disgustingly vulnerable on main. Dave isn’t sure if it’s better or worse that Anna doesn’t even blink at the request.

“Oh, sure, no problem,” Anna says, immediately. “You wanna hear about the blade system which will make me bust a gut with anger? Or would you rather hear about something really dumb I did when I was like thirteen.”

“Oh, hit me with that one,” Dave says. “Wonder if it’s any stupider than some of the shit I got up to at thirteen.”

He doubts it is, but also figures it’s probably like… regular stupid, and not Sburb stupid.

“Is it the one where you almost got arrested?” Kratos asks.

“No, no, the one with the roof,” Anna answer.

“ _Oh,_ ” Kratos says, in perfect understanding, and buries his face in his hand. Anna just grins wider.

“Alright, now I gotta hear this,” Dave says, flopping back to lay in the dirt because, like, fuck it, at this point. It’s more comfortable, anyway. “If it’s not stupid as shit I want a refund, though.” And that doesn’t even make any sense but he rolls with it and Anna rolls with it and.

They end up spending a long while doing that. Trying to one-up each other over stupid shit they did at thirteen. Dave’s not sure who’s winning by the end of it, but Anna gets a real fucking kick out of him and Terezi’s fucking timelooping stock market scam against the nakodiles so maybe he is winning, after all. Hell fucking yes.

And he’s barely thinking about Bro by the end of it.


End file.
